Huma and Anthony: Scenes from a marriage

New York City Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner unleashed his typical torrent of verbiage on Tuesday — but words couldn’t compete with the excruciating image of his embarrassed wife squirming in the spotlight both have sought.

In the most cringe-worthy moment of a four-month political comeback yarn that has tested Gotham’s gag reflex, Huma Abedin, the dignified wife of a serially disgraced Democrat, nervously defended her husband at a Tuesday press conference.

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If the presence of Abedin, an elegant longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, was intended to buttress the former congressman’s decision to remain in the race, it graphically illustrated the personal toll his quest is taking on his family and represented the gravest threat yet to Weiner’s fragile repentance-and-redemption narrative.

His luck may be running out. The tragi-slapstick spectacle of Weiner and his wife appearing at the gritty offices of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Center in Manhattan to save his career clearly marked a new, and dangerous, phase for Weiner.

“You want this guy to be mayor? Or you want him in therapy?” asked an incredulous Doug Muzzio, a Baruch College professor and longtime observer of city scandal, from Koch-era corruption to Rudy Giuliani’s well-chronicled infidelities.

If Abedin was complicit, she also appeared deeply pained. She struggled to find a comfortable standing position as her husband soldiered through his statement, smiling uncomfortably to reporters she had met as Clinton’s body woman, at times physically drifting away from Weiner, as if she wanted to somehow slip quietly out of the camera frame, stage left.

No such luck. When it was time for her to speak, she unfolded a single sheet of white bond, apologized for her nervousness and remarked how her marriage survived only after “a lot of therapy.”

Only a few hours earlier, a website called “The Dirty” posted revelations her husband had used the online handle “Carlos Danger” to share a picture of his penis with a young woman who admired his health care reform “rants.”

Weiner has long suggested that more pictures and texts would pop out of the ether, but on Tuesday he admitted a damning new detail: That he had been carrying on an e-affair until last November — after resigning his House seat, apologizing to his wife and becoming a national punchline.

Weiner, who has held his own in recent polls against a Democratic field that includes City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, former City Comptroller Bill Thompson and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, seemed to be befuddled by his own behavior.

“Perhaps I’m surprised more things haven’t come out sooner. This behavior that I did was problematic to say the least and destructive to say the most,” he said. “I’m sure many of my opponents would like me to drop out of the race.”